Historical story

Development of animal representations in art and science ran parallel for a long time

Artists and natural historians in the sixteenth century had their hands full with all kinds of newly discovered animal species, about which they still did not know everything. Sometimes not even whether they had legs or not. Marrigje Rikken researched the images of animals from this period for her PhD. This shows that the artists also tried to organize animals in a scientific way and in doing so were even ahead of the natural historians.

The many voyages of discovery in the sixteenth century made the world a lot bigger. The new seas and continents contain all kinds of flora and fauna that the Europeans had never seen before. Explorers took everything back home with them, including exotic animals, or made drawings of these unknown beasts on the spot.

The animal kingdom as the Dutch knew it was thus expanded considerably. Scientists debated these new finds. What species were they and what family did they belong to? Do zebras belong to the horse family because they are similar in build, or to the penguin family because they are black and white? This was seriously and hard thought and intensive correspondence about it.

It happens in Antwerp

Art historian Marrigje Rikken (Leiden University) will be awarded a PhD on the development of animal representations between 1550 and 1630 in the Southern Netherlands, now Flanders. She discovered that the arts and science were closely linked in animal representations. Antwerp was the most important city here. From 1550 artists made many drawings of exotic animals here and after 1570 publishers published series of animal prints.

Artists copied the animals from work by their predecessors or from illustrations from scientific books. Rikken:“Explorers, craftsmen or the writers made these simple illustrations with woodcuts. They contained less detail and were purely intended to supplement the text in the book. However, the drawings and later prints by artists were separate from the text and were made purely to look at.”

Scientific publications in expensive books were not accessible to everyone, but the research shows that the Antwerp cartographer and humanist Abraham Ortelius gave artists access to them. He has thus been an important link in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Rikken:“Ortelius corresponded with scientists about new animals and he had many artists in his circle of acquaintances. In his letters, for example, I encountered a debate about the reproduction of the exotic tree goose. The scientists disputed whether this species of geese grew as fruit on trees or whether the geese sprouted from mussels that lived on tree stumps. Then you see how artists from the circle around Ortelius drew this goose.”

Crazy Beasts

The artists around Ortelius not only depicted the newly discovered animals, but also thought about how they should be arranged. Rikken:“Marcus Gheeraerts made a print with a giraffe, an armadillo, a sheep and a unicorn. Why had he put these animals together? It took a while for me to drop the penny, but I think they are together because they are all even-toed ungulates. All four animals stand stately next to each other and can be seen from the side and profile. The legs are clearly visible and even-toed, even if it is not correct. A unicorn of course does not exist and an armadillo has no hooves, but Gheeraerts copied that image from a scientific publication, in which an armadillo with hooves was illustrated. Natural historians hadn't yet made this soliped arrangement, so here art was ahead of science."

Gaps in knowledge about exotic animals made for – in our current view – more funny misunderstandings. “In early drawings of the civet, the animal has a collar on. Joris Hoefnagel, who placed his animals in a landscape, omitted the collar and moved the ears back. So the ears are no longer in the right place, which looks very strange. Other artists copied this version of the civet indiscriminately, so we now know exactly which drawing they used as an example.”

Fragile legs

Scientific works on animals and animal species relied heavily on pre-existing texts, including ancient texts. According to Rikken, artists looked much better at the animals themselves. In the period she researched (1550-1630) she saw that natural historians entered a transitional phase and gradually started to observe animals as well.

“The Leiden scientist Carolus Clusius published a natural history work in 1605 in which he writes about the bird of paradise. Clusius had heard that the bird turned out to have legs, but he hadn't seen it himself yet. The then well-known story that this special bird never landed but always hovered through the air, began to show cracks. This theory had entered the world because Europeans had for a long time only been able to see this alien bird when it was stuffed and the fragile legs were left out or broken off.”

When new knowledge became available, artists showed it in their works. Jan Brueghel the Elder, for example, painted the bird-of-paradise with exaggeratedly long legs from about 1615 to show the spectators that he was aware of the latest scientific knowledge about the beast. Brueghel was a forerunner in exotic animal painting, a new genre. If he first had to fall back on the well-known animal prints and drawings from Antwerp, this changed after 1604. Then Brueghel visited the court of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) in Prague.

Rikken:“With the fall of Antwerp in 1585, many artists left the city. Rudolf II was a great lover of art and science and he managed to attract many well-known artists from the South of the Netherlands to Prague. Rudolf also collected live exotic animals and artists could study these animals in his private zoo. They then immortalized the exotics in all kinds of poses and with oil paint, because animals could be depicted much more vividly than in a print. Around 1600 Prague became the new place-to-be for the production of animal representations, and the painting the new medium.”

Painters also became involved in the arrangement of the animals, for example in depicting the Biblical paradise. The painter Roelant Savery only made the distinction between exotics and native animals, but over time painters increasingly organized the animals by family. Then, for example, they placed all the felines together on the canvas. They also broke with the tradition of their drawing predecessors, who copied each other's work and scientific illustrations exactly.

For painters it was precisely the art to paint as much as possible from life. They started to portray the animals in different poses so that everyone could see that they had studied these wonderful creatures in real life in the collections of their patrons. In doing so, they also went further than the illustrations in natural history publications, in which the animals were always only seen in one pose.